Motorsports and Watches Go the Distance With Genuine Collaborations

By

Laurie kahle

June 19, 2018 12:00 am ET

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In 1935, Malcolm Campbell piloted the 28-foot-long, 2,300-horsepower Blue Bird 5 over the sand of Daytona Beach, Fla., to establish a world record by reaching a speed of 276.816 miles per hour. And he did it wearing a Rolex Oyster watch.

As long as competitive drivers have been compelled to go faster and faster, they have needed precise timekeepers—specifically chronographs—to effectively track speeds, lap times, and pit times. No other sport is as historically and intrinsically intertwined with watches as motor racing.

Partnerships between car marques, races, and watch brands have long been commonplace. But few brands, such as Rolex and TAG Heuer, can boast an authentic heritage in motor sports. Recently, some younger brands are taking automotive partnerships to the next level, collaborating with car companies to develop innovative products, instead of a typical licensing agreement that would involve slapping a brand’s logo onto the dial of a watch designed to evoke a car.

$27,500 Rolex’s Daytona

Whether or not you are a racing fan, these watches range from everyday rugged classics that look sharp with jeans or a suit to seriously avant-garde technical statements at nosebleed prices.

For 25 years, Rolex has sponsored the Rolex 24 at Daytona endurance race, awarding winners with a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona inscribed with the word “winner” on the back. Rolex’s most coveted model, the Daytona ($12,400 to $75,000) was introduced in 1963 with a tachymetric scale that allowed drivers to calculate average speeds of up to 400 kilometers or miles per hour. The actor and race-car driver Paul Newman made the Daytona famous, and his watch sold at a Phillips auction in New York last fall for a record-smashing price of $17.752 million, including fees.

Heuer (acquired by TAG Group in 1985 to become TAG Heuer, which was bought by
LVMH
in 1999) can also brag about a deep legacy in motor sports that goes back to 1933, when the brand launched Autavia, the first dashboard stopwatch for race cars. Autavia was resurrected as a wristwatch chronograph in 1962, and a new version (US$5,150), modeled on a 1966 Autavia worn by Austrian F1 driver Jochen Rindt, launched last year.

The brand’s flagship Carrera, introduced in 1963 and named for the perilous Carrera Panamericana road race, was designed for clear legibility and shock resistance with race-car drivers in mind. This year, TAG marks the 55th anniversary of the Carrera with a full lineup (automatics from $1,500 to $6,550 and tourbillons from $17,000 to $24,500), including two special editions produced in collaboration with its new partner, Aston Martin: a mechanical Calibre Heuer 01 chronograph and a quartz Formula 1 chronograph. Also new are special Gulf and Bamford editions of its square Monaco, which was famously worn by Steve McQueen in the 1971 film Le Mans. The 2018 Monacos range from $1,750 to $5,900.

$231,000 Roger Dubuis’ Excalibur Aventador S

Automotive partnerships are being taken to extremes at the high end of the market, with watch designers collaborating with research-and-development departments to produce jaw-dropping watches that push the limits both technically and aesthetically.

Roger Dubuis worked closely with Lamborghini on the Excalibur Aventador S ($210,000 or $231,000), featuring a Lamborghini-exclusive movement modeled on Aventador S engines. “The more we exchanged with Lamborghini, the more we realized it would make no sense to use an existing caliber in the Lamborghini timepieces,” says Gregory Bruttin, Roger Dubuis’ product-strategy director. The resulting RD103SQ movement achieved five patents, all of which took cues from motor sports.

Meanwhile, Richard Mille has tapped F1 racing for inspiration since its inception 17 years ago. In 2016, the cutting-edge watch brand inked a 10-year deal with McLaren.

“They are obsessed with making the lightest and most powerful cars in the world, which have a very different design dictated by the function of the car. And that’s exactly what we’ve done—the forms of our watches have always been dictated by the functions,” explains Tim Malachard, Richard Mille’s worldwide head of sales and marketing.

$6,550 TAG Heuer’s Carrera (with Aston Martin)

And at the Geneva International Motor Show this past March, Richard Mille unveiled the company’s RM 11-03 McLaren Automatic Flyback Chronograph ($191,500), which is limited to 500 pieces. McLaren design director Rob Melville and Richard Mille engineer Fabrice Namura worked together to give the watch, which was an existing chronograph, the McLaren touch. The watch’s lightweight yet highly robust Carbon TPT case is infused with orange Quartz TPT, in a nod to McLaren’s signature color.

The titanium chronograph pushers evoke the headlights of the McLaren 720S, the bezel is fitted with titanium inserts resembling McLaren F1’s air-intake snorkel, and the grade-five titanium crown is shaped like a McLaren wheel.

Richard Mille’s RM 50-03 Tourbillon Split Seconds Chronograph Ultralight McLaren F1, which debuted in 2017, is limited to 75 pieces and priced at $980,000. The watch is made using titanium, TPT Carbon and a new nanomaterial, Graph TPT, or graphene, which is six times lighter than steel, yet 200 times stronger. The molecular compound is also used in McLaren’s Formula 1 race cars.

And when Hublot set out to make a special limited-edition watch to mark the 70th anniversary of its Ferrari partner last year, it turned the design process over to Ferrari’s revered design center, headed by Flavio Manzoni.

This year, Hublot followed up the Techframe Ferrari 70 Years Tourbillon Chronograph with two limited-edition variations in PEEK (polyether ether ketone) carbon with yellow accents ($137,000) and in microblasted white gold and sapphire crystal ($179,000).

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